The Brooklyn Public Library, faced with a proposed fourteen-million-dollar budget cut, may be forced to reduce services, with many neighborhood branches open only five hours a day, five days a week.

Iggy Pop’s new album, “Préliminaires,” whose title translates as “Foreplay” in French, was inspired by the novel “The Possibility of an Island,” by Michel Houellebecq.

How to write a David Foster Wallace sentence in ten steps. (No. 9: “Replace common words with their oddly specific, scientific-y counterparts.”)

The Saudi writer Rajaa Alsanea, whose début novel “Girls of Riyadh” was banned by her government, is looking forward to a career as an orthodontist: “Dentistry balances my life. Going to work knowing that you’re not famous puts your feet on the ground.”

The poet Seamus Heaney has won the David Cohen Prize, a biennal award for lifetime achievement whose previous recipients include Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing.